Ally's Number Recognition Ability

During my time in my Kindergarten LAL/Math resource classroom I observed a student, who will be referred to as Ally for confidentiality reasons. Specifically, I observed Ally’s number recognition ability. Ally is currently five years old and is in her seventh month of Kindergarten. Ally lives at home with her mother, father, and older brother Mathew. Ally’s parents are very involved in her school life. They attend celebrations, meetings, and other events. Ally comes from a Russian family. Her parents both speak Russian and English. Ally is a fun loving student who enjoys coming to school and learning with her peers. Ally rarely has behavior issues and is typically compliant with her teachers. Ally also attends Russian school on the weekends …show more content…
This assessment was a sheet of paper with numbers zero to fifty listed in random order. Ally was taken to a quiet secluded corner in the classroom to begin the assessment. Ally works best with as few distractions and noise as possible. During the assessment I went from left to right and pointed to each number and Ally was instructed to say what the number was aloud. I also thought it would be beneficial if I used a blank piece of paper and blocked out the rest of the number lines so she wasn’t overwhelmed by all the numbers and could focus solely on the current number. On this assessment Ally correctly identified eight out of fifty one numbers. Ally’s score was converted to a 15%. Ally’s peers in her resource room both scored 100% on the same assessment. Kindergarteners at this time of the year should be scoring around 75% or higher. Knowing this information really enforces that Ally has a strong need in this area. During the assessment I noticed that Ally was relying on her counting ability when she didn’t know the numbers. For instance she would say 20, 30, 40, 50… across the whole line. Additionally, if the number was 35 she would say 31, she was able to identify the right tens place but not the ones often place often. Many times during the assessment when Ally came across numbers she did not know she would seem to get frustrated and sigh or put her hands on her head with anger. I always …show more content…
This lesson was completed on April 4th, 2017. The lesson plan for this activity is attached. In this lesson I orally said a number between 20-29 aloud. Ally was to repeat the number back, write the number, and say the number again. I often asked Ally to repeat the number she constructed more than once to reiterate the number. When writing the numbers Ally would often say “How do you make 28?” I would say, “you need a $#$#1$#$# and an 8”. For almost all numbers I would have to cue Ally in writing the numbers by saying jingles such as “around the tree around the tree that’s how you make the number three”. Some of the difficulty that stood out to me was when Ally wrote the number 20 she wrote it correctly and then looked at the number and said 28. I had Ally re-do the number 20 and say the name again. Additionally, writing and saying the numbers 26 and 29 seemed to be very difficult for Ally. I had Ally write and say 26 and 29 more than once. Each time Ally confused the two numbers. If we were working on 26 she would call it 29 even though she wrote 26. The same confusion happened when writing 29. I do understand this confusion with the number six and nine. It is very similar to Ally’s confusion with the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’. I discussed this with my cooperating teacher and she said confusion of numbers six and nine and letters ‘b’ and ‘d’ is very common amongst Kindergarten students at this point in the